Coming Out of a Dark Wood
The first lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy set the scene and mood for perhaps the greatest poetry ever written.
Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.*
My daughter was released from the hospital 10 weeks after we took her to the emergency room. She was not “midway” through life, but only a teenager when she found herself in the dark wood of anxiety that led to the hell of anorexia.
For several weeks before she was admitted it was a war, where every meal was a battle and every swallow was a struggle. But the war was not against my daughter. It was against the voice in her head, the demon, the liar who wants her to suffer before taking her life. Personalizing the illness as a demonic possession is as real as it gets; more so than a mysterious virus. Eventually, the voice was so strong that she stopped eating anything and we all agreed, even my daughter, that she needed to go to the hospital. Leaving the hospital does not mean she is cured. Far from it. The long climb out of anorexia is a difficult purgatory that could take years. Thus, we know this will take a long time to pass, but we know that it will pass.
My daughter’s condition can be added to the terrible toll of mental illness taken on teenagers today. An age of anxiety is described in a new book by Jonathan Haidt. (see the data in this preview The Anxious Generation | Jonathan Haidt). Look around and you will find articles, books and conversations about these problems (for example, here, here, here, here, and here). The anxiety of my daughter has certainly been exacerbated by social networks, but there are any number of foisted anxieties of mod
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